Page - 299 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Gender and Identity organizations and seem to have had virtually no involvement with the organized Jew- ish community. Thus, the Jewishness of university women must be measured more by their attitudes and friendship patterns than by their public behavior or religious observance. Within a study population of 460 women of Jewish parentage who attended Ger- man or Austrian universities before the Nazi era, roughly 26 percent studied at the University of Vienna ; these 122 women provide the basis for the following analysis. Slightly over half of these women were born in Vienna ; about one-quarter came from Galicia or Bukovina ; the rest hailed from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary or Bosnia. Information on their lives has been gleaned primarily from memoirs, questionnaires, interviews, biographies and biographical dictionaries. Jewish women who attended the University of Vienna demonstrated a spectrum of personal, religious and national identity. For convenience, I have divided them into three broad groupings : the “Jewish Jews” who actively affirmed their Jewishness ; the “Modern Jews” who remained at least nominally affiliated ; and the “Former Jews” who formally left the Jewish community through baptism or by declaring themselves konfessionslos. It should be noted that highly assimilated women, in particular So- cialists and Communists, were more likely to write about their lives than Zionists or women from Orthodox backgrounds. Hence, “Jewish Jews” might be somewhat underrepresented at approximately 10 % of my sample, and “Former Jews” overrepre- sented at between 15 and 25 %. But at least two-thirds of these university women, like Rose-Marie Papanek-Akselrad, can undoubtedly be classified as “Modern Jews”. A woman’s Jewish identity evolves and often changes over a lifetime. It is influ- enced by many different factors, including not only gender, but family background, geographic origins, and socio-economic status, as well as youth group involvement, marriage and political ideology. Not surprisingly, most of the “Jewish Jews” were either born in Galicia or had parents from Galicia, and were raised in traditional or Orthodox households. One such respondent with a doctorate in chemistry “grew up in Vienna in a culture which blended the traditional with the modern, religious observance and the world of music, art, ballet and opera.” She described her home as strictly kosher ; Sabbath and holidays were observed ; the family attended synagogue regularly and maintained a strict standard of modest behavior. In addition to the required religious education classes in public school, she and her sister had a private For a complete analysis of this study population, putting Viennese Jewish university women within the context of all Central European university women, see Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Female, Jewish and Educated : The Lives of Central European University Women, Bloomington 2002.